I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books she published, replied, "Classic books." One of the students asked her, "You mean like Kafka?" Apparently she said, "Oh, I don't think I would publish Kafka."

I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.

I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about why the movie business is the way it is, and why the publishing industry is too.)

I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.

Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.

I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.

There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.